I've thought about this before, but recently I got triggered to write this, thanks to this image:
(From this post)
You'll notice that the output of npx is in French (I'm guessing that's @gmartigny's system language). But the output of lyo is in English. My deduction is that NPM uses internationalised strings, while lyo uses hard-coded English.
I'm not blaming Lyo. Internationalisation is non-rivial work (which languages to support, machine translations vs paying translators, ensuring UI components don't look weird on some languages,...). Personally, I've never worked on an app that supported languages other than English.
So much of the software world uses English as a lingua franca (programming language keywords, documentation, package commands, and the like), to the point where developers who aren't fluent in English still release packages in English.
However, I'm curious. What's it like for developers whose primary language is not English (or who are not fluent in English)?
What's it like to come to a GitHub readme and have to use Google Translate to figure out how to use the package?🤔🤔
The irony that this post is in English is not lost on me.😆
Latest comments (32)
just wanted to say i really appreciate being exposed to this discussion!
At first I tried using software with my native translations, but a lot of terms didn't made much sense. So I opted out to everything English, not a single app I have uses my native language.
It was hard at first, but eventually I got used to English. I got so used to it, that I have challenges discussing IT related topics in my native language.
For sure the non english speaker will be more productive in their native language because it is easier to think in their mother tongue.
My mother tongue is Mandarin. As both English and Mandarin are the languages from different world, often when I read the documentations I have some degree of difficulties on understanding a long sentence, especially when the author can write a very "native" English.
For my case, the difficulties of reading often come from grammar first, as the word order sometimes is different between both languages, and the use of prefixes and suffixes in English does not exist in Mandarin. The use of prefixes and suffixes can bring to my second issue, which is vocabulary. Usually when I meet an unfamiliar word, I will figure out its root word first, then guessing the actual meaning the author wants to express. Google translate won't help much on the second issue.
Wow. Thanks for sharing. It's so enlightening hearing about how people all over the world experience the things we take for granted.
Spanish, French, Swedish... at least you are using alphabets. think about the programmers dealing with DBCS such as Korean, Chinese & Japanese. I learned programming in Korea and worked there for few years. it's extra fun just count the characters in the string. 😊 yes, now a days, english is mandatory to stay in dev world I think.
When I was younger and knew no English, words like "console", "string", "if... else" etc seemed like special magic words and you just learn what they do. When I learned English, I thought: huh, so everything a program does is spelled out in plain English.
Hehe. I guess the idea of "magic" words is really useful. Kinda like how we might not know the meaning of many Unix commands, but we use them.
My native language is the Brazilian Portuguese, and at start of my college, my English was so crappy. To write a full comment like this, I had to always go to Translate. But it had to change...
My college have a scientific initiation project, with researches that, in the case of the course of Systems Analysis and Development, could be a software development project or a systematic review mapping. While in the first you can just know Portuguese (which many of my colleagues do), in the second... Definitely no. We had to read several articles on ACM, Scopus and other research bases and all of articles in my project was in English. After that, if I'm not so fluent, I guess at least I could maintain a minimal understandable conversation.
Wow, that's interesting.
The first thing people tell you about learning programming is "You have to learn English first, or you won't get anywhere".
It's accepted as a fact of the trade here in Serbia.
It's hard for me to imagine what it's like to write code in your native language. I imagine using keywords, methods and variable names, shell commands in my native language -- it would be weird!
I was lucky, and when I've started programming I had good enough level of English.
As for the other people, usually, developers inevitably learn at least some English by reading the documentation and consuming other it-related content.
However, grammar mistakes in the code, weird comments or commit messages are not rare.
Even in English, I find readmes to make almost no sense and have little value.
🤣🤣